Hope and Survival—How did I miss this for 24 years?
After a month of grizzly work removing rubble from Ground Zero ( the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers in NY), Rebecca Cough, a lady in a hard hat, noticed that a tree, about to be scooped up by a bulldozer, was burned and badly damaged, but it still showed signs of life.
Only a few leaves hug from a single branch of the tree. Its roots were snapped and burned, and its boughs were broken. Yet the workers were determined to save the tree. They sent it to the Van Cortlandt Park for convalescence under the care of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. Park workers said they weren't sure the tree would make it, but the tree did. In the spring of 2002, she sprouted a riot of leaves, and a dove made a nest in her boughs.
It is The Survivor Tree, a Callery Pear tree planted in the 1970s and had been humming along, providing beauty, shade, and protection for wildlife who either lived there or were passing through.
When Ronaldo Vega became the special project manager in 2007, he remembered the story of the tree and went to the Bronx to find it.
"Where's our Survivor Tree?" he asked his colleagues. "I know there's a Survivor Tree. I've heard the legend. I know it's out there." (It had been lost for a few years as there are many Callery Pear Trees are in NY.) Finally, Vega emailed some of his former colleagues at the Department of Design and Construction. Rebecca Clough, an assistant commissioner, replied, "I know where that tree is."
"I fell in love with her the second I saw her," Vegas said. "She was a fighter. We knew she was going to come back here." And so, after nine years of rehab in the Bronx, the Survivor Tree went home. She was planted at the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum, where she stands 35 feet tall, scared but robust, and offers her branches to birds and shade to those passing by.
I learned of the Survivor tree in Jane Goodall's book HOPE with Douglas Abrams. Upon looking up the tree on the Internet, I saw that Goodall visited the tree on Peace Day on September 21, 2012.
Thank you, Jane and Abrams, for telling me this story.
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